“How lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared!”
“How lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared!”
“How lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared!”
Lizzie, sunk in the chair, eyed her like a brooding sphinx. She met the gaze with the boldness of the meek roused to passion:
“You do hate it, Miss Harris. You’ve done asgood as say so. And it’s new now, you’re only beginning. Wait till you come home every evening, disgusted with it all and everything and everybody; when it’s bad weather and you feel sick and nobody cares. Wait till you have to stand anything they hand out to you, and not say a word back or you’ll lose your job. I know. I’ve tried it and it’s tough. It’s too much. Any man that ’ud come along and offer to take you out of it would look all right to you.” Her boldness began to weaken before that formidable gaze. She became hurriedly apologetic. “I’m not saying thereisany man. I’m only supposing. And I don’t mean now. I mean after you’ve been up against it for years and years and the grind’s crushed the heart out of you.”
There was no answer, and the oracle, now openly scared at her temerity, scrambled to her feet. In the momentary silence I heard the distant bang of the street door. She heard it too and forgot her fear, wheeling to the mirror for a quick touching up of her hair ribbon and frill. When she turned back her color had risen to match her reddened lips and her manner showed a flurried haste.
“I got to go—several things to attend to—my supper and some sewing to finish.” She didn’t bother tobe careful of excuses. The man who hoped to acquire the legal right to pay her bills was waiting below. She went, trailing the Navajo blanket from a hanging hand.
Lizzie drew a deep breath and said:
“She’s right.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“You mean the teaching?”
“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”
She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.
“But you’ve hardly tried it.”
“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”
She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.
“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin roof, “don’t know whatan artist is. They think they’re condescending, doing a kindness.I’mthe one that’s condescending—I do them not a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the squawking of their barbarous children.”
“You can’t expect them to think that.”
“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who knew nothing.”
“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”
“Certainly I did. Only that. I was polite and patient. If I hadn’t felt so disgusted and out of spirits I’d have spoken to her freely and fully. But it wasn’t worth while.”
“But they won’t stand that sort of thing. They won’t have you again.”
“I don’t intend to go again. I couldn’t endure it for five minutes. I’d rather sweep a crossing on Lexington Avenue.”
“There aren’t any crossings on Lexington Avenue,and if there were, you don’t know how to sweep. What will you say to Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Ashworth?”
She shrugged with an almost insolent indifference.
“I’ll say I don’t like it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“Lizzie, I beg of you to be reasonable. They won’t go on helping you if you disappoint them like this.”
“Then they can stop helping me—I’m not so immensely charmed and interested in them. They try and force me into things I don’t want to do. They take it out of my hands and then come smiling at me and say it’s all arranged. So it is—to their liking but not to mine.”
“It’s your profession, the only thing you know. What else could they do?”
“Let me alone.”
It was like beating yourself on a brick wall. I felt frantic.
“Butwhat’sgoing to become of you? You’ve got no means of livelihood.”
She shrugged again.
“I don’t know. But one thing I do know and thatis that I won’t do slave’s work for you, or Mrs. Ferguson, or any one else in the world.”
I didn’t know what to say. I might go on talking all night and not make a dent on her. Demosthenes would have turned away baffled before her impossible unreasonableness.
It was getting dark and I could see her as a tall black silhouette against the blue dusk of the window. There was only one suggestion left.
“Are you going to take Dolly Bliss’s advice and marry?” My voice sounded unnatural, like somebody else’s.
“Marry?” she echoed absently. “I suppose Icoulddo that.”
“Is it that you can’t make up your mind, Lizzie?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured again, this time as if she wasn’t thinking of what she said.
I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and mine.
“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.
Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:
“Oh God, how I hate it all!”
“Hate what—marriage?”
“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work—no money—no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else. You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than go on this way.”
She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay prone, abandoned to the storm.
I stood helplessly regarding her, then as brokensentences came from under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield, while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.
There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself, which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with the wine-glass. The room was empty—she had gone leaving the black hat.
I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the climax.
I didn’t count—with my hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. I could retire into any corner, and live forgotten and love forlorn like Mariana. But Lizzie—? She couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t teach, nobody could help her. Marriage was the only way out. As I sat on the sofa, absently staring at the hat, I had a memory of a corral I had seen at a railway station in a trip I once took to the West. It was a pen for the cattle that came off the range and had to be driven into the cars. The entrance was wide, but the fenced enclosure narrowed and narrowed until there was only one way of exit left, up a gangway to the car. The comparison wasn’t elegant but it struck me as fitting—Lizzie was on the gangway with the entrance to the car the only way to go.
“I wish to heaven she’d hurry and get into it,” I groaned.